...so be gentle...it may be my first time, but I'll try to make it enjoyable for you...and if I finish before you're ready, I hope you'll give me another chance to prove myself.  I imagine I'll get better each time we do this...if you have any tips, please feel free to let me know...and remember, this isn't a 'serious' thing, but just a bit of fun.  We should set the rules now: We can read other people's blogs if we want to.  I can't promise to blog just with you.  I'm in my experimental phase here, and so if either of us wants to 'blog around' that's ok.  If I don't blog with as many people as I can now, I might regret it when I can no longer keep my server up, and the blogging years are behind me.

Hmm, where to begin?  Firstly, I probably won't be able to blog regularly, I'm afraid the idea of such commitment frightens me (see above).  I may blog once or twice a week, or I may not blog for a few weeks on end.  Don't take this personally; it's me, not you.  But when I do blog, I hope it'll be worth the wait.

If you've bothered with the foreplay and read my bio, you'll know that I am a jobbing actor, comedian and writer.  I am making forays into the world of voice over artiste (never sure whether I should put the e on the end of artist...it glamorises and makes me sound like a dick, all in one) as well as having a possible project next year presenting a documentary on the Royal National Lifeboat Institute (living the dream!) filmed circumnavigating the UK in a decommissioned lifeboat (don't worry, it still works…I hope).  That in a nutshell is what I do to keep the wolves from my door, although living in the dark forest is only asking for trouble.

I forgot to mention that I am also writing a book – this is not making me any money at all, but it is giving me guilt on a biblical level each time I spend any amount of time on the web instead of doing some 'proper' writing.  It is a book for teens/young adults.  It has its roots in Egyptian Mythology.  It also has some quite grown up themes.  It is my hope that it is not patronising, and at least interesting.  The quality of the writing…we-ell…I'll leave that up to the editor and the readers once it gets a publisher (how positive I am!).

I have just read over this entry, and I am rambling already…maybe I should get on with posing questions, answering them stupidly, hoping for responses from anyone out there who can be bothered, whilst getting as much swearing, scatological references, and puerile stuff out of my system as possible…we'll see.

I woke myself the other night (as I do on many nights – although on this occasion it wasn't to check if I'd pissed myself in my sleep – a fear I have had since childhood – an unfounded one as it turns out, as I haven't wet the bed since being 4 or 5 years old) with a strange thought. 

I am a smoker (and Bill Hicks was right about the sexual connotations of smoking!) and of course, being blessed with at least half a brain, I am not only aware of, but am shitting myself with fear of, cancer.  But (and here's the thought that awoke me) the Government health department is coming at this from the completely wrong angle.  The messages on the pack are not stopping us from smoking…well maybe the weaker minded members of the smoking fraternity are swayed, but then I don't believe they were truly ever 'hooked' in the first place.  No, those of us in the 'Community' fear not the message on the pack (it is almost a badge of courage to be worn that states 'Fuck You!  This is my kind of Russian roulette, and nobody's gonna ruin it for me!), neither do we fear the social stigma, wherein we are forced out of buildings in all weathers to engage in our pleasure.  We certainly don't give a fuck about the cost of smoking either.  The more they tax tobacco, the more we are going to be fashionably elite.  "Hey, can't afford to smoke?...Too bad you poor loser bastard, I'm on forty a day!"  The new 'bling' won't be crude platinum and diamond encrusted jewellery, it'll be a pack of Marlborough Lights and a pack of Marlborough Red hanging from necklaces of calcified lung tissue, with cigarette butt cufflinks, and some freshly coughed-up lung-butter to coiffure your hair with!  Ahh, what a picture!

My thoughts, however, did move on from this.  What would it take to make you stop smoking?  As I have said, the fear of possibly getting cancer doesn't do it.  Everyone knows of someone who knows someone who smoke two packs a day and got to live to his nineties.  The Russian roulette thought process is in play here…it'll NEVER happen to me!  In order to combat this uncertainty, the governments of the world should make sure that you get cancer from smoking EVERY TIME.  What with all the nuclear waste products in the world at the moment, it would be simply a case of irradiating every single packet.  In this way, you are GUARANTEED to get cancer.  Some people say things like "It's the not knowing that's killing me"….BULLSHIT!  Now you can definitely say  "I know it's killing me" and be more accepting of your fate.  You will have less stress, and you won't wake yourself up in the middle of the night with stupid thoughts that worry the crap out of you.

If you don't smoke, please don't start.  Forget the threat of cancer, it's all the stress involved that'll make your life hell.  If you do smoke…fuck it!  Make it even more enjoyable and light up a doobie…next to irradiating the cigarettes, it's the least stressful way to smoke yourself to oblivion, and you have a laugh doing it!

Thank you for reading…this has been very therapeutic for me, and I hope so for you.